June 27, 2016

Said Elizabeth Warren, adopting the literary trope of listing bodily organs as she tried out in the role of VP candidate alongside Hillary Clinton at Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal today. How many people would you think an event like that would draw in a city that size? It was only 2,600. Isn't that weird?

"She said she's 5 percent Native American. She was unable to prove it. She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her career.... Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work with her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. She made up her heritage which I think is racist... I think she's a racist actually, because what she did was very racist."

Racist racist racist... say it 3 times and it might make it true. Trump will never get his opponents to stop calling him racist, so you can understand why he's going the no, you're racist route. It's kind of interesting the way he's doing it here, because it's a very different kind of racism charge. He's accused of racial hostility, but he's accusing Warren of being a racial huckster.

Meanwhile, ex-Senator Scott Brown — who may himself be auditioning for the VP role on the Trump side — said "She’s not Native American, she’s not 1/32nd, she has no Native American background, except for what her family told her" and why doesn't she "take a DNA test" and release the results?

Here you have Trump making uop facts. When pressed, I don't think Elzabeth Warren ever claimed a figure as high as 5% and 5% is mathematically impossible without going back alarge number of generatuions with more than one ancestor with different oartial ancestry.

One sixteenth would be 6.25%. 1/32 is 3.13%

I don't think Elizabeth Warren is auditioning for VOP but she was always trying to help Hillary, from pretending she might be a candidate (to discourage anyone else from making a run at it and prevent them from raising money) to delaying endorsing Hillary (so that it might matter when she did)

"She said she's 5 percent Native American. She was unable to prove it. She used the fact that she was Native American to advance her career.... Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. I know it. Other people who work with her know it. Elizabeth Warren is a total fraud. She made up her heritage which I think is racist... I think she's a racist actually, because what she did was very racist.""

Growing up, Elizabeth Warren was told by her parents and grandparents that she was of Cherokee and Delaware Native American heritage. Her brothers have confirmed this story, meaning that Warren is of the honest belief that she is part Native American. As there would have been no reason for her grandparents to have made up such a story during her youth, it’s a reasonable expectation that it is the truth. In fact one genealogical society has dug up a decades-old newsletter which referred to Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as being Cherokee, supporting Warren’s claim (source: The Atlantic). In any case, there is no factual argument to be made by anyone who claims that she isn’t of Native American descent, nor have any of her detractors tried to offer any evidence in that regard.

As for the claim that Elizabeth Warren used her Native American heritage in order to get a job at Harvard, her supervisors have publicly confirmed that it played no role in the matter and that they weren’t even aware of it at the time of her hiring. Instead, the entire supposed controversy is merely based on a fabrication made up by her failed senate race opponent in 2012, republican Scott Brown (sources: Washington Post, New York Times).

Reports indicate that Warren's great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Smith was of the Cherokee tribe. Smith's 1894 marriage license application described her as Cherokee, though the original copy could not be found, CNN reported.

But the University of Pennsylvania, where Warren intermittently taught law school from 1987 through 1995, touted Warren as a minority faculty member in an official school publication, according to an online document obtained by The Boston Globe.

The school listed her as a minority in a “Minority Equity Report’’ posted on its website. The report, published in 2005, well after her departure, included her as the winner of a faculty teaching award in 1994. Her name was highlighted in bold, the designation used for minorities in the report. Neither the Warren campaign nor the University of Pennsylvania would explain why she was listed as a minority. The Boston Globe

ince the controversy erupted in late April, Warren has said she was unaware that Harvard University, her current employer, had described her as a Native American when it was under fire for a lack of diversity on its law school faculty in the 1990s.

Neither the University of Pennsylvania, nor Harvard, where she has taught since 1995, has released employment records for Warren.

Brown has challenged Warren to ask the schools to make those documents available. She has declined.

Warren has said she was proud of her Native American heritage and that she listed herself as a minority in the legal directory from 1986 through 1995, because she was hoping to connect with “people like me.’’ The directory, however, did not list her as someone with Native American heritage. It simply said “minority.’’

Leonard P. Strickman, founding dean at Florida International University, one of the nation’s most diverse law schools, said deans often consult the Association of American Law Schools directory when seeking out minority applicants but look more at scholarship before making hires. - The Boston Globe

But keep muddying the waters with those newsbin articles, that's what they pay you for, isn't it, Unknown?

As for the claim that Elizabeth Warren used her Native American heritage in order to get a job at Harvard, her supervisors have publicly confirmed that it played no role in the matter and that they weren’t even aware of it at the time of her hiring.

Well, then let Harvard identify who on their faculty they thought was Native American if it wasn't Warren.

I'm sorry, how fucking credulous does someone have to be to think that a bunch of academics won't lie through their teeth when caught with their pants down & there's no repercussions to lying? It's not that stuff like this doesn't happen elsewhere in academia, too. Remember bat-shit crazy Ward Churchill at U of Colorado, Boulder? He said he was not only of Native American descent, but was a member of the Keetowah band of Cherokee. The only problem was, the Keetowah had no such record of him being such.

Academics institutions never, ever pay a price for such EEOC screw-ups. Never. So, if something is too good to verify, well, by golly, it stays unverified.

Four outraged Cherokee activists who say Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has ignored their emails and phone calls will trek to Boston this week in hopes they can force a meeting with the Democratic Senate candidate over her “offensive” Native American heritage claims.“It’s almost becoming extremely offensive to us,” said Twila Barnes, a Cherokee genealogist who has researched Warren’s family tree. “We’re trying to get in contact and explain why her behavior hurts us and is offensive, and she totally ignores that. Like we don’t exist.” …What they want, Barnes said, is for Warren to sit down with them and to stop claiming she’s a Native American.“We would like to see her look at the documentation and admit there’s no Indian ancestry there and then apologize,” Barnes said. “Hear us. Acknowledge us. Know that she’s brought us into this. We didn’t bring ourselves into this. This whole trip was planned to get a meeting with her.”

"The problem with the internet is that there are no gatekeepers" - Hillary Clinton.

I am sure she is quite chagrined that these kinds of things can't be disappeared.

Hillary has the brains of a criminal mastermind, the guts of a burglar, the steady hands of a safecracker... Not sure how her thick skin fits into her criminal anatomy, unless it's to make her shameless. And her heart, like the Grinch's, is three sizes too small. Makes up for her supersized cankles, I guess.

"As there would have been no reason for her grandparents to have made up such a story during her youth, it’s a reasonable expectation that it is the truth."

How do we know they had no reason to? My mother and her siblings grew up being told that a relative of theirs was Native American. There is exactly zero documentation of its truth, and, in fact, it's almost assuredly not true. Nobody had a reason to purposefully lie about it, but the best we can figure out is that someone either made a joke or an assumption based on a nickname she used, and the rest of the family ran with it from there.

As someone on this blog (clears throat) said a while ago, the VP thing will be a matter of cold calculation for both Hill and Fauxahontas. If they decide it advances Prog power, it's a deal. Looks like they figure Trump gives real Progressivism an opening. I think they are right.

These were the hare-brained schemes Hillary Big Heart was pushing today.

Don't even get me started on the girl who graduated from college with $100,000 student debt and is now spending her time volunteering for Hillary. Get out there and get a job and pay back your loans, missy!

I wouldn't say that Hillary has a thick skin. It's crusted over with scabs but there are many suppurating sores that are sensitive to the touch. And, of course, there's a lot of scar tissue that limits her tactile sense. I wouldn't say Hillary's skin is her best quality. That's undoubtedly her hearty, infectious laugh.

What all the various idiots and scoundrels haven't been talking about - this is the US in decline, where it counts, and the only place it counts. The various politicians haven't mentioned this (though Trump may be alluding to it in his own odd way). Neither has the mass media. Not have academics, or so they call themselves, other than in the few places that still deserve the name of university.

Anybody who is not obsessing about the matters raised below, and modifying their politics accordingly, is living in a fantasy.

...U.S. productivity grew at a mere 1.3 percent per year from 2005 to 2015, far less than the 2.8 percent annual growth rate during the decade earlier. Syverson calculates that had the slowdown not occurred, the gross domestic product would have been $2.7 trillion higher by 2015—about $8,400 for every American.

...in 2013 Americans started fewer businesses than they did in 1980, when the country’s population was much smaller. This decline isn’t just due to the aging of the U.S. population—Americans of all ages just seem less likely to open new businesses than they once were. And, as Hathaway and Litan put it, the decline “has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech.”

Warren didn't run for the Presidency because she knows she couldn't get away with the Indian ancestry lie. For her, it must really hurt having to play second fiddle to an incompetent, repugnant, corrupt slime bag like Hillary when she knows she could have easily won the Democratic nomination. Imagine, being that close to the most powerful position in the world but disqualifying yourself over one stupid lie. In private, she'll be kinking herself the rest of her life.

I suspect Warren has already done a DNA.. Keeping quiet because she is not Cherokee, or letting Trump and others dig a hole, then springing positive result. Would not doubt family lore, as it may have seemed romantic at the time she was told, noble redskin and all..On the other hand, must wonder if Trump has proof positive she is not Indian, and is hoping she will provide a false report that he can use to destroy her completely.

Correct, that is the 500 pound gorilla, in Europe, in Britain, the core problem with the EU and European governments, and the US. Everyone understands that the global economy is paralyzed. Alan Greenspan has been getting frantic. Stagnant economies, paralysis of technological progress, loss of enterprise. This turns everything into a zero sum game. Or worse. That is the deadly illness we have all caught. And the Democrat - bureaucratic - corporatists want to keep it that way.

"As there would have been no reason for her grandparents to have made up such a story during her youth, it’s a reasonable expectation that it is the truth."

"How do we know they had no reason to? My mother and her siblings grew up being told that a relative of theirs was Native American. There is exactly zero documentation of its truth, and, in fact, it's almost assuredly not true. Nobody had a reason to purposefully lie about it, but the best we can figure out is that someone either made a joke or an assumption based on a nickname she used, and the rest of the family ran with it from there."

I was just reading a biography of Johnny Cash, who grew up believing he was part Cherokee until he paid for genealogy research and found out he was mostly scottish and zero percent Indian. Seems like lots of families told stories like these.

In my family my aunt married a man from the Quapaw tribe in OK and all of their kids and grandkids are registered with the tribe. If you really believe you are part Indian, there are financial incentives to make your connection official.

For crying out loud, who cares if Warren is 1/32nd Indian. I and about half of all Americans who have ancestors who've lived here over 100 yrs are, too. And none of us, except Fauxcahontas Liz, would dream of using a set-aside for disadvantaged people as a privilege for ourselves. That's the crux. The fact that a family story (which, again, a lot of us have) led her to claim an Indian's spot is a moral outrage.

Unknown's proof from an Atlantic article ("In fact one genealogical society has dug up a decades-old newsletter which referred to Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as being Cherokee, supporting Warren’s claim [source: The Atlantic]") is not proof at all if you read the entire Article because the genealogical society realized that an amateur writing in the newsletter had made a mistake. You might have been better off with the Pow Wow Chow cookbook.

I don't see Warren getting the VP slot. Wrong demographics. She is an old white woman. Maybe more liberal than Hillary, but the young Sanders people, her fake Indian thing would be toxic, which is why Trump knows to use it. I think Hillary's running mate has to be relatively young, and male. Energetic. My bet is still Hispanic. Black is possible, but I think the overt racism of the Obama Administration makes this unlikely. Blacks will mostly vote for her anyway, and what she needs are Whites, who know they got shafted by Obama.

This Unknown is obviously being fed propaganda so that he can dump it in places like this. My guess s a Soros group that pretends to accuracy, but in reality is just a media arm of the DNC. Which reminds me of the testimony of Sid Blumenthal released yesterday by the Dems as their Benghazi report. He talked about making some $200k a year, in addition to his Clinton Foundation salary, and some consulting gigs, from some of David Brock's propaganda groups, like Media Mutters, Correct the Record, etc. The money was direct deposited, so he never knew, month to month, which of these groups were feeding him money.

The reason that you know Unknown's sources are BS is that Warren at Harvard doesn't pass the smell test. It just isn't plausible. Given her age, she might have gotten her first law school job on her own merits. But law schools are insanely snobby. They are looking for the (liberal) Ted Cruzes, brilliant Princeton/Harvard, and in his case Hispanic. Good clerking experience, at least any more an appeals court, and best is, of course, SCOTUS. Warren went to a middling undergrad, and a middling law school. Because she is only barely a Baby Boomer, she got in at the front end of that cohort. But with her credentials, she probably wouldn't have progressed. But she jumped, twice, ending up at the top, HLS. Apparently with the worst credentials of anyone on that faculty. Remember when I mentioned snobby? Nowhere worse than Harvard and probably Yale. If her scholarship had been brilliant, then barely maybe. But it wasn't. Which leads to the conclusion that she was able to advance based almost entirely on her claiming Indian ancestry, and her employers wanting to claim it for diversity. Diversity is big with law schools. Really big. Maybe nowhere worse in the country. I have spent the last quarter century or more listening to a friend of mine regale me with tales of how this Lesbian or that Hispanic was added to his faculty with piddling credentials, teach classes with few students, do it badly, and get better raises than he does, with more publications, overflowing classes, and top student reviews. As I said with Warren not using her claimed Indian heritage to advance - it just isn't plausible. It just doesn't work that way. It jumped her from White Bread at the back of the bus over all the Blacks, Hispancs, and Lesbians to the very front.

Explain to me then why it was fine to game affirmative action to get jobs at Penn and Harvard. Nobody gives a flying fuck about her family lore if that were all it were, a family story.

So if you really do want to understand the issue, which I sincerely doubt, try this one weird trick, restate the argument you don't agree with clearly in your own words, then tell us what is wrong with it. Go ahead. All the good schools used to teach this method of argumentation.

Include in your answer that she has admitted listing herself as a "minority" in a directory of law professors. Who knows? Maybe you can win over a few converts for Warren.

If this sort of attack didn't work in 2012--when it got lots of press and Scott Brown took up the charge--I doubt it'd make much difference now. Maybe Trump is trying to scare Clinton off of picking Warren for VP, but then if Warren is vulnerable (and she's likely more vulnerable for scaring off moderates with her populist crap) wouldn't it make more sense to save these attacks for after she gets picked?

And if you're going after her for faking her ancestry, go for the jugular--point out how she prospered via affirmative action for this. No one cares about lying about your ancestry, but many do care about someone getting racial privileges--particularly if that someone lied about their race to get them.

Brando, you have to brand them with the stink of their own actions early. The first thing people should think about with Warren is that she is an AA cheat.

Nobody is going to understand arguments that her scholarship on "medical bankruptcy" is complete crap, which, of course, goes right to the point again that she was not qualified to be on the Harvard faculty.

tim in vermont said...Nobody is going to understand arguments that her scholarship on "medical bankruptcy" is complete crap, which, of course, goes right to the point again that she was not qualified to be on the Harvard faculty.

Academic support for Warren (she is by far their favorite candidate) demonstrates she is exactly the faculty they deem qualified: someone who can convert the Harvard brand into demagogic propaganda furthering government supremacy over both business and citizens.

In fact one genealogical society has dug up a decades-old newsletter which referred to Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as being Cherokee, supporting Warren’s claim (source: The Atlantic).

"Decades old newsletter"? That certainly beats DNA testing or any actual documentation.

In any case, there is no factual argument to be made by anyone who claims that she isn’t of Native American descent, nor have any of her detractors tried to offer any evidence in that regard.

They've presented birth records of her parents and grandparents.

She's provided a "decades-old newsletter"

As for the claim that Elizabeth Warren used her Native American heritage in order to get a job at Harvard, her supervisors have publicly confirmed that it played no role in the matter and that they weren’t even aware of it at the time of her hiring.

They just championed having a native American faculty member nobody can name --- but Warren did claim to be one right until she got tenure.

Then she stopped.

Sounds legit.

Reports indicate that Warren's great-great-great-grandmother Sarah Smith was of the Cherokee tribe. Smith's 1894 marriage license application described her as Cherokee, though the original copy could not be found, CNN reported.

"Brando, you have to brand them with the stink of their own actions early. The first thing people should think about with Warren is that she is an AA cheat.

Nobody is going to understand arguments that her scholarship on "medical bankruptcy" is complete crap, which, of course, goes right to the point again that she was not qualified to be on the Harvard faculty."

You don't even need to get into the weeds--simply point out that she peddled herself as Indian, Harvard provides preferences for Indians, she got hired. It raises both the notion of racial privileges (which most people, even a lot of liberals, are not comfortable with) as well as the notion of an opportunist fudging her background to take advantage of those racial privileges.

A lot like the Clinton e-mail scandal, we seem to be missing a bit of tree from forest here--it actually doesn't matter if Warren is actually 1/32 Cherokee (as she claims) or not. The fact that someone with such a tiny fraction of Cherokee ancestry USED that ancestry to get ahead in a racial spoils system is the scandal. The point of such preferences is (apparently) to benefit those who suffered past or present discrimination and increase diversity, not to help a 31/32 white woman get ahead because she happened to have some distant ancestor who fits an ethnic type.

A lot like the Clinton e-mail scandal, we seem to be missing a bit of tree from forest here--it actually doesn't matter if Warren is actually 1/32 Cherokee (as she claims) or not. The fact that someone with such a tiny fraction of Cherokee ancestry USED that ancestry to get ahead in a racial spoils system is the scandal. The point of such preferences is (apparently) to benefit those who suffered past or present discrimination and increase diversity, not to help a 31/32 white woman get ahead because she happened to have some distant ancestor who fits an ethnic type.

Yeah, a simple picture of her with the narration of "She claimed to be a Native American to get a position at Harvard, then tenure --- then suddenly stopped claiming she was Native American the next year.

"Bushman of the Kohlrabi said...Warren didn't run for the Presidency because she knows she couldn't get away with the Indian ancestry lie. For her, it must really hurt having to play second fiddle to an incompetent, repugnant, corrupt slime bag like Hillary when she knows she could have easily won the Democratic nomination. Imagine, being that close to the most powerful position in the world but disqualifying yourself over one stupid lie. In private, she'll be kinking herself the rest of her life."

"In private, she'll be kinking herself the rest of her life." That sounds right, but the rest is crap. If not for that lie no one would know her name. That lie provided the advancement.

"I think it's very unfair to say that Warren isn't native American. I have no doubt whatsoever that she would sellout the country for some glittery beads."

She's one of the very few in Congress--if not the only one--who attempts to hold the bankers' feet to the fire when they appear before Congress. The bankers are the chief enemies of the people of the world, and her efforts to thwart them are honorable and urgently necessary. If only her peers were as dogged as she in these efforts.

I've seen no evidence that she knowingly misrepresented herself as having indigenous American heritage, or that she benefitted by this in her career. If she had been told by her family of this supposed heritage, why would she not believe it?

All this said, I'm terribly disappointed in her for her support of the grotesque Hillary Clinton, favored by the very bankers and Wall Street parasites Warren has criticized, and as blood-thirsty a war-hawk as exists in Washington today. She's selling out Americans for her political career.

I've seen no evidence that she knowingly misrepresented herself as having indigenous American heritage, or that she benefitted by this in her career

Can you explain why she stopped claiming to be Native right after she got tenure?

I'm betting it's a coincidence, right?

If she had been told by her family of this supposed heritage, why would she not believe it?

That nothing about her looks remotely Native. If she was whiter, she'd be opaque.

All this said, I'm terribly disappointed in her for her support of the grotesque Hillary Clinton, favored by the very bankers and Wall Street parasites Warren has criticized, and as blood-thirsty a war-hawk as exists in Washington today. She's selling out Americans for her political career.

True Believerism is always a bad idea when it comes to loathsome politicians. The best we could hope for is a massive explosion at the Capital during a State of the Union speech.

"Can you explain why she stopped claiming to be Native right after she got tenure?"

Did she? Had she made it a regular practice to march around proclaiming her indigenous American heritage?

"That nothing about her looks remotely Native. If she was whiter, she'd be opaque."

That's just ignorant. Do you think a fractional bit of indigenous American blood would necessarily give Warren the skin tone and features revealing that heritage? Don't you know how genetics works?

"True Believerism is always a bad idea when it comes to loathsome politicians."

Yes, but my estimation of Warren was not a case of "true believerism," but a case of having hopes that here we had a politician who really meant what she said and would try to do what she promised. Aside from her egregious endorsement of Hillary Clinton, she has not otherwise disappointed my hopes in that regard. However, I'll have to see whether she will remain as avid a nemesis to the bankers as before--or not--given this turn of events.

It is healthy to be skeptical of politicians, but it is unhealthy to assume a priori that each and every politician is always "loathesome" or otherwise nefarious. We must give them a chance to betray us before withdrawing from them our benefit of the doubt.

The most interesting thing about this whole affair is that 10 months ago to a first approximation, zero people thought Trump had a clue about what he was doing.

Now, even people that claim they will not vote for him are coming up with theories about why he says (or repeats or belabors) what he says. He's doing this to scare her from running for VP, Trump has proof she is not indian, etc.

I am not going full Scott Adams here, never go full Scott Adams, I am just pointing out that when your opponents are postulating out loud, why you are taking action X or action Y you are living in some headspace rent free. The days of shrugging and saying "eh, he's a blowhard" seem to be fading.

Did she? Had she made it a regular practice to march around proclaiming her indigenous American heritage?

She has admitted to listing herself as a minority in publication which is often referred to by schools looking for minority candidates for positions.

Do you think a fractional bit of indigenous American blood would necessarily give Warren the skin tone and features revealing that heritage? Don't you know how genetics works?

So let me get this straight... You are not arguing that she has been held back because others have based their judgements against her on her appearance, since nobody could tell she was an Indian, so that would not be the purpose of affirmative action. Then I guess you are saying that WERE SHE 1/32 Cherokee, she would have some genetic disability that required redress in this manner, even though it was invisible to everybody? That is was so important to redress this invisible wrong, that more qualified candidates, or indeed, other affirmative action candidates should be passed over? Is that what you are claiming?

What is the FUCKING PURPOSE of affirmative action in your world, Robert?